


By fair means or fowl

by defractum (nyargles)



Category: All For The Game - Nora Sakavic
Genre: Alternate Universe - Wings, M/M, Slow Burn, Wingfic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-13
Updated: 2017-08-13
Packaged: 2018-12-15 00:49:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 20,772
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11794980
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nyargles/pseuds/defractum
Summary: An AU where they all have wings.“I was looking for you. Notyou,” says Neil, “but I’ve been looking for – others. Others like me.”Andrew raises his eyebrows and looks Neil over from top to bottom and back to the top. His upper lip curls. “You’re nothing like me.”





	By fair means or fowl

**Author's Note:**

> This is my AFTG Big Bang fic. A huge thanks to godot who did some amazing art for me!
> 
> This is very, _very_ loosely based on the world of When The Wind Blows by James Patterson.

He is not alone.

It's first time that Neil has had any proof of it, of other winged humans existing, still alive and outside of the experimental laboratories, and he doesn't quite know what to do with that feeling. He had known of their existence, of course. He has a folder full of smudged newspaper cuttings, tracking the fleeting and sporadic sightings in the news as best as he could, but there haven't been any for a while, and Neil didn't know whether that was because they just hadn't been seen, or because they existed no longer.

But now, the tiniest sliver of hope slices through his heart despite his best attempts to quash it, and Neil pulls out the ratty paper map he keeps tucked into his bag with a clearer sense of direction.

He's never been that far south before. He prefers mild temperatures - anything out of the ordinary makes his wings hurt. The joints swell in the cold and the layers he wears to hide the stumps are too much when it's hot, but if it's his best chance, he's going.

  
  


Neil is methodical about his painkillers. He doesn't like to use them; they make him woozy and unable to think on his feet, and he relies on his feet to stay alive. (He tried to do this once without taking them, and remembers waking up in a blood of his own blood and sheared off feathers after he fainted, precious time wasted.) It's a small, electric handsaw. Bird feathers and bones are light, hollow, built for flight, and easily broken. It takes more time building up the nerve to do the deed than to actually press the harsh buzzing instrument through his wings, as close to his back as he can manage, and cut his wings down.

Neil throws up bile once he's done, his fingers barely turning the saw off before he dry-retches, a poor substitute for a scream and a thrash, which is what he really wants to do. His fingers twitch uncontrollably, the pain frazzling the rest of his body, and Neil grabs the pile of towel with paw-like hands and throws them onto the bed, gritting his teeth before lying back on them.

Pain shoots through every nerve in his back, white-hot at the stubs of the wings he just cut off. He tries not to look at the feathers that flutter downwards. He used to try and pluck them out but now he just shaves them down, less bothersome than the wing that keeps trying to regrow.

Neil lies on his back, brain muddy with pain despite the painkillers, and stares up at the ceiling. There's a strange, muddy stain near the fan, and his brain wonders how it got there. Cutting his wings off was much easier when his mother used to do it for him.

  
  


Neil moves from bus to train to train to bus, spending all of it in an exhausted haze. He cleans himself up in the cramped bathrooms, trying not to stand out by being too dirty, too ratty. He wishes he could fly. He’s never done it before, but he bets it would be much quicker.

South Carolina turns out to be not as hot as he had expected, and Neil makes it all the way to the edge of the Frances Marion National Forest before he realises just how big it is.

He fishes out a scrapbook from his dufflebag. Its pages are filled with cuttings and printouts that seem ridiculous at first. There’s a blog from a woman raving about UFOs, and an article from a tabloid where a couple of brothers insist that superheroes exist. There’s a conspiracy theory essay about the existence of human experimentation, and another about a cult that practices bestiality. To be fair, the bestiality one is immensely creepy and probably not related, but Neil had stuck it in anyway, just in case it was.

He flicks expertly back to the most recently filled page. The print out there is smudgy, the result of both an ancient library printer, and too much zooming in. The picture’s been cropped - originally it had been a picture of some hikers, but Neil had noticed the blurs in the background, high up in the trees. They look like large birds at first, but there are no birds of that size in Frances Marion National Forest. There are no human-sized birds at all.

Neil’s first reference point is where this photo of the hikers was taken. He braces himself for a long and futile search - he could be too late and they’ve moved on or been captured, or he could spend days searching the forest and never find them, or worst of all, he could be completely wrong and they were never here to start with.

The forest is thick and damp, and though Neil is sweating through his layers with the exertion, the shade keeps him cool enough. He makes a faint mark against the trees to indicate the direction he’s been taking but hours later, the only signs of life are still the constant buzzing of insects. Neil tucks himself between two enormous roots, and digs out some food and water.

He’s quietly munching on cereal bars when the first shadow passes over him. He looks up, and misses it, but there’s another one close behind. A human-sized bird. Not that those exist.

Excitement swells in Neil’s stomach like nausea, he’s so unused to it. He cranes his neck to watch it as it slides between the trunks of the trees, but stays quiet until it disappears. He doesn’t want to scare them off before he gets a chance to speak to them, but even the knowledge that they’re real, they’re _here_ is enough for now.

Neil waits for a while before he pulls himself up. He doesn’t want to scare them off. He eases himself through the bushes with as little rustling as possible. He doesn’t have a lot to go on – they moved out of sight so quickly – but now he’s thinking about it differently. He looks up at the tops of the trees, and navigates using the gaps. There wouldn’t enough room to fly through there, or they couldn’t have gone that way, or there isn’t enough cover on that side.

Something tells him he’s getting closer; hope swells in his chest despite his best efforts.

A tree branch comes swinging out of nowhere and smashes him in the stomach hard enough to throw him back off his feet. Neil crumples to the ground, the wind knocked out of him. That wasn’t a normal tree branch, they don’t come this low, something’s wrong – Neil flings his arms over his face and scrabbles backwards, his feet trying to find purchase in the damp soil even as his body threatens to dry heave. He knows how to throw his guard up in a fight.

The tree branch comes swinging at him again and Neil catches it across his forearms; there’s a sickening _crunch_ , but it’s the branch breaking, not his arms, so he doesn’t waste time thinking about it. There’s a person attached to the other end of that tree branch, his face hidden in the shadow of the forest and his wings looming high above his back, no, there’s two people, and fuck, it’s –

“Kevin?!”

The taller of the two steps forward, his face pale. He rests a hand on his companion’s shoulder. “Who are you?” he demands. “How do you know my name?”

Neil stares into a face he never thought he’d see again. Kevin’s taller now. Older, much older. He stares at Neil as if he’s looking at a ghost, and Neil almost laugh at the bitterness that rises up in him. Now is not the time to be jealous that Kevin doesn’t recognise him.

“It’s – Nathaniel.” That name hasn’t passed his lips in as many years as since he last saw Kevin. “We met – Evermore.”

“Nathaniel.” Kevin repeats it as if he’s waking up from a bad dream. “I remember.”

Neil swallows. “I go by Neil now.” Or rather, at the moment.

“Neil,” repeats Kevin again.

“Don’t make me hit you too,” says the other person suddenly, breaking the atmosphere of their strange reunion. He’s still holding the tree branch even though it’s snapped, half of it dragging against the ground.

“I can’t believe you – How did you escape? I heard that – well, there were stories. Everyone assumed you – Why are you here? I mean, how did you find – I mean, this is Andrew.” Kevin tips a hand at Andrew awkwardly and steps back into the shadows before more he can vomit any more words.  
  
“I was looking for you. Not _you_ ,” says Neil, “but I’ve been looking for – others. Others like me.”

Andrew raises his eyebrows and looks Neil over from top to bottom and back to the top. His upper lip curls. “You’re nothing like me.”

He hefts the tree branch over one shoulder with one hand as he turns; the other hand he pushes into the small of Kevin’s back, shepherding him back into the thicker copse of trees.

“Wait,” says Neil, finally pushing himself to his feet. “Wait, wait, I’ve just found you, you can’t _go_ , I –”

Andrew keeps walking until Kevin says, in a low voice but loud enough for Neil to hear, “Bring him.”

The look that Andrew shoots him over his shoulder is not friendly, but Neil catches up with them anyway.

  
  


Neil hasn't exactly had a childhood full of climbing trees. He tries to regulate his breathing; he's in decent physical condition, but this is different to the kind of cardio that running is, and he's trying not to give away how out of breath he is. He scrabbles up as best as he can, the bark scraping thin red lines against his skin, but neither of them offer to help him, and he doesn't ask.

Moving from tree to tree is a precarious task. Neil hugs the trunk of a tree, trying to estimate which of these branches will carry his weight and which overlap with a branch from another tree that will also hold his weight, and all the time, there are two pairs of dark eyes boring into him - Kevin annoyed and Andrew amused. Progress is painfully slow.

It seems like hours until Neil finally catches up to the two of them and they don’t fly on ahead. Now Neil can focus on more than the bark under his hands and feet - he’d taken his socks and shoes off long ago, stuffing them ungainly into his duffel bag - he looks around him. He’s soaked through with sweat, and there are scratches on every part of his skin that’s exposed. He’s pretty sure he’s started bleeding through his back again, but he’s used to ignoring that, at least.

It takes a moment for Neil’s eyes to get adjusted, but now he can see that there are shapes camouflaged in among the trees. He breathes in deeply and holds it, trying desperately not to show them how out of breath he is as Kevin pushes aside a branch, but the sight makes him inhale so sharply he feels a stab in his lungs.

There are people. Multiple people. Three girls are sitting together, their legs dangling over a branch; their heads swing around as one in his direction. There’s two guys in hammocks, rocking lazily and tossing a ball between themselves, who also sit up when they see Neil; one of them looks exactly like Andrew. There’s one last person on a branch a little further up and Neil only notices once the shadow falls over his face; it’s a tall guy, unwrapping something from a cloth bundle.

“Kevin?” asks the girl with dark hair and skin. She hasn’t moved, but Neil can see the immediate tension in her shoulders and the way her wings are slightly spread, ready to go at a moment’s notice. Neil notices that she doesn’t ask Andrew anything.

“I know him,” says Kevin tersely. “From Evermore.”

That gets a reaction. Neil has no idea where they were hiding them, but there are suddenly at least three guns pointed at him, and a couple of batons _shiiiick_ as they extend to full-length.

“I’m one of you,” says Neil hastily. He feels like Kevin should have led with that.

There’s a momentary silence. “No, you’re not,” says the girl who looks like a model. She’s immaculately put together, and the long, curled feathers in her wings match her long blonde hair.

“Yeah, where’re your wings?” This comes from a guy with dark curly hair who looks at Neil like he doesn’t know whether to settle on scared, confused or interested.

“None of your business,” says Neil before thinking about it.

Suspicion seeps through the trees like filtered sunlight, soaking into the patches of skin it can find.

Kevin huffs, as if all of them are being needlessly dramatic. "He's injured," he says shortly. "Aaron, take a look at him."

Aaron turns out to be Andrew's twin. He scowls, and looks as though he's going to protest for a moment, but Kevin takes off again before he can say anything. The rest of them carry on staring at Neil, and Neil takes the opportunity to stare back. His eyes adjust slowly, but it looks like they live here. Hammocks are strung up close to the tree trunks, dark green camouflage in colour; those not in use are pushed flat to be less obtrusive. There are bundles of personal items strapped to each hammock, now that he's looking properly, sleeves and collars and towels peeking out of each bundle.

A simple set of rope bridges string across the largest five or six trees, going up and down to set people down at various heights. It's a single rope for the feet, triangulating out to two rope rails at waist height, and it looks like everything is spread out so that they're not all clustered together. It's like camping, but twenty, thirty feet in the air.

"Andrew didn't kill him, so it's probably all right, right?" asks the guy from earlier in a deliberately loud whisper. Aaron glowers at him, but makes some vague sort of gesture that probably means Neil should go with him.

Aaron unwinds the concoction of scraps of t-shirt and bandages that Neil uses to hide his wing stumps, and hisses when he sees them. "What the fuck," he says, loudly enough that there’s a flurry of leaves and feathers and suddenly the others are clustered around. They jostle to see, each recoiling when they spot the sharp, jagged edges of bone jutting out from Neil's back. They're growing out again, already.

"Who did that to you?" asks one of the girls. She looks genuinely horrified, and Neil takes a moment to realise that she thinks that someone else did this to him.

"I did," he says, and the look she gives him is suddenly full of pity. "It's easier to be on the run when you look normal."

"But it's easier to fly if you have wings," says Kevin, his voice clearly implying that Neil is an absolute idiot.

"Leave it," says one of the other boys. He's holding a bottle of water, which he uses to pour over Neil's back. The rest of the cloth peels away easier after that, and he helps pick out the bits of broken feathers starting to clump together. Neil stays very very still; he hasn't had his bare back to anyone for a prolonged period of time before, not even his mother aside from when she'd be cutting the wings off. "We've all wished they were less obvious sometimes. I'm Matt, by the way."

They all take that as a cue to introduce themselves. The names run past him like warmed over taffy: Matt, Dan, Allison, Renee, Aaron, and Nicky.

"Neil," says Neil finally. He should probably come up with a new alias, but he hasn't got the paperwork sorted for a new one yet. He'll have to destroy the old ones now; they've served their purpose.

"So," says Nicky with a sideways glance at Kevin, "Evermore, huh?"

"Let’s not talk about it."

Nicky holds his hands up. "Understandable. How come you're here now?"

Neil thinks of the scrapbook in his duffel bag. "A lot of searching. I knew I couldn't be the only one who survived or escaped – I didn't know Kevin was going to be here, but I kept an eye out on the news, for weird sightings, people who thought they saw superheroes or aliens, that sort of thing. There were a lot of dead ends."

Kevin's lips pinch together in disapproval. "If you could find us, so could someone else."

"Perimeter's clear," says the quiet girl – Renee, Neil thinks her name is.

Kevin shakes his head. "We should move on anyway. In case anyone followed him."

It's a fair point. Neil doesn't think he was followed, but there are people actively hunting for him.

"We've scouted out some next possible sites," agrees Dan. "We'll move in the morning."

 

 

 

They... fly.

It's obvious once Neil thinks about it, because it’s the easiest way to travel for them, but there's also the obvious fact that Neil doesn't. They use one of the hammocks to rig up a net for him to sit in, and take turns helping to lift him along with the packs. It terrifies Neil – not just the height, but the lack of control. He rises when they rise and dips when they go down. They use cloud cover and trees to hide themselves, and set down to walk if they need to, but flying still makes Neil feel so exposed.

They've clearly been doing this for a while, because they fly as a flock, a coordination that Neil has only seen glimpses of at Evermore, but it's also evident that the extra weight is a burden on them. They stop often enough for rests that Kevin spends the whole day scowling, and Neil refuses to apologise. He'll just have to stop being a burden.

They end up in another forest, a bit further north now. The trees here are thicker, and the air more humid, and Matt breaks away to scout the way.

The first thing they do once they've set Neil down is reach for some tech he hadn't noticed them packing up this morning. Some security cameras and a couple of short poles. He doesn't ask, because it doesn't occur for him to – Neil hasn't really spoken to another human being for, heck, it must be years now – but Matt catches him looking, and explains.

"Electric fences. It's a last resort, but we can set up a rudimentary perimeter and defend it while we pack up and leave."

Neil nods, not knowing whether to thank him for the information or not.

"We use the webcams to monitor motion, and it's all connected to the computer." He pulls a couple of battered laptops out of a bag, along with what looks like solar panels and a hand generator. That explains what Matt was doing on the top of the trees yesterday. Without outlets out here, they have to generate their own electricity.

"You're very prepared," says Neil grudgingly.

Matt nods. "We have to be. We're not just camping for the fun of it. We've got to be able to keep up with the outside world and what's happening all around at the same time. We've been doing this for a while."

"A while?"

Matt looks around the group thoughtfully. "Everyone's got their own story to tell, so I'm not going to do it for them, but I've been on the run for a few years now. Dan too. We met Andrew's lot maybe eighteen months back."

Andrew's lot. Interesting - Neil would have thought that it was Kevin's lot.

"Me too. Been on the run, I mean. But I've been sticking to the cities." It's easier to get lost in a crowd of people than be the only people around.

"Yeah," says Matt, "but it's hard to do without crippling yourself. No offense, but I don't think I could do that to myself on a regular basis." His tone is light, but he's wearing a t-shirt, and Neil can see the old, faded track marks on his arms. They're not the same as the kind Neil has, from IVs and stimulants and experiments.

"Me either." Neil lets it drop there. He doesn't want to tell them about Mary.

Matt isn't the only one curious about Neil. Andrew corners Neil next, flying onto the branch he's sitting on and sitting so close to him that Neil's jammed up against the tree trunk.

"What do you want with Kevin?" Andrew isn't even looking at Neil. His eyes are fixed on Kevin instead about four trees away, where he's inspecting some of their cooking equipment.

"Nothing."

Andrew does look at Neil then, a piercing sideways stare that Neil refuses to let shake him. "You're Evermore."

"I'm Evermore like Kevin was Evermore," says Neil. "We were going to both be on the same accelerated skills track."

"Were." Andrew is good – he picks up on Neil's choice of words immediately. He'd thought perhaps that Andrew's long silences to mean that he didn't care about what Neil had to say, but it's the opposite. He's been watching listening, processing for the last day, and now he's chosen a time when Kevin is too busy to look up and see what they're doing.

"Were. I left Evermore before we started. Kevin stayed, I believe."

"No one leaves Evermore."

"That's what I thought. It's why I wasn't expecting to see Kevin here." In reality, Neil has barely thought about Kevin for years now. He'd assumed he'd just been assimilated into Evermore's programme or dead like everyone else. They must have tightened up their security after Mary broke in and hauled Neil out.

"Then how did you leave, little birdy?"

When Neil turns his head, Andrew's face is a little too close to Neil's for comfort. He tries not to recoil away, even though he can feel the ghost of Andrew's breath on his nose. "I broke out."

"You? Or your mother? Where's she?"

That does make Neil recoil. "How do you know about my mother?"

That makes Andrew smile, a vicious slash of white teeth across his face, and Neil curses inwardly for letting Andrew rattle him. It's not that strange once he takes a moment to think about it – Kevin must have told him about it last night.

"Is she dead, little birdy?"

Neil swallows. "Yeah. She's – gone."

It's the first time he'd said that aloud, he realises. It's been his reality for a year now, but still. There's something more substantial about having the words come out of his mouth.

"Dead." Andrew raises a finger, and pokes him in the shoulder with it. "Like you will be, if you get caught."

"I don't plan on getting caught."

"Neither do we." Andrew turns back to look at Kevin again, who's making some sort of food from the pile of shrubbery that Aaron and Nicky have deposited in front of him. "You're a fugitive, and we don't need that kind of attention. Whatever confirmation or solidarity you were looking for that other experimental bird freaks exist – you've got it. You may go now."

Neil shakes his head in disbelief. "You're a fugitive too. There's no way there isn't some lab out there looking for you, even if it's not Evermore. And I've been evading attention for years now, whereas I found you lot from crazy people's newspaper articles and internet blog posts. I think I can say that I've been more sucessful than you at keeping a low profile."

"By cutting two of your own limbs off." Andrew's voice is thick with derision. In truth, Neil knows that it's harder to be completely unseen in a large group. It's just that – he had to try. To see if there were other people who had survived what he had.

"I'll kill you," adds Andrew. "If that's what it takes."

Neil looks down at his hands. He remembers them being covered in blood, Mary's blood. He didn't do that with his own hands, but he might as well have. "I'd kill you too."

Andrew laughs, and looks genuinely delighted. "Feisty."

Neil has no idea what to say to that.

That seems to be the end of that conversation, in any case. Neil isn't sure he's managed to convince Andrew of anything, but they've both said their piece. Andrew spreads his wings and floats down to where Kevin is adding mushrooms to the pan with one last backward look at Neil – his command of his flight is honestly astounding – and that's that. For now.

He figures out that even though they’re all working together to stay hidden, they're actually more like two different flocks. There's Andrew, Aaron, Kevin and Nicky on one side, and they've got a treehouse tent of waterproof canvas set up in one tree whereas Allison, Renee, Dan and Matt make up the other, and they have smaller tents that they've rigged across two trees.

Despite the inconvenience, they strip everything down into packs at the start of each day, and only set them back up again in the evening. Mary, in the back of Neil’s head, approves of the caution. Neil sleeps lightly, but he's not used to sleeping in a hammock, in a tent, in a tree.

They take shifts through the night, overlapping their sleep patterns so that there's always someone on watch, keeping an eye on the camp and the laptop. He prefers to rise early, so he joins Renee before dawn, watching as tendrils of watery sunlight start to inch through the trees.

They sit in silence for a bit, the ambient noise of the forest around them growing to a comfortable buzz as animals and insects rise for the day.

“It’s not much, you know.”

Neil blinks, and looks at her. She’s wearing an oversized t-shirt with the back ripped out and a scarf draped over the top where the hole for her wings are. Neil’s going to have to do that if he’s really going to grow his wings back out.

"What's not much?"

"This," she says, and waves her hand across. "Our life. We're always on the move, always looking out for new places we can hide. It's not much of a life." She doesn't sound sad or bitter about it, just matter-of-fact.

"It's not like mine's been much different." Neil's got money, but it's exhausting, doing everything by himself. He's only seen what they've done for the last couple of days, but he can already tell that they've got everything split up between them - it's so much easier than trying to feed and clothe himself but also work out travel and doing research on the best places to hide.

"It could be more." She smiles at him, and Neil doesn't really know what to say to that. He's never really expected more than what his life was; he'd accepted the reality of it long ago.

The wings start to grow back. It's painful, and sometimes Neil wakes up and can't figure out whether he's flexing a real limb or one that isn't there anymore, and he has to get used to sleeping on his front. Kevin insists that he stretch them every day, get used to moving them, flexing them, even when they're just stumps. Neil does do it, but only when Kevin isn't watching.

Tiny fuzzy grey feathers grow first, and the first time Kevin plucks one of them out, Neil flinches so hard he elbows Kevin in the gut. Kevin grunts, and smacks his arm away.

“They’ll grow crooked,” snaps Kevin and Neil doesn’t know how to tell him that for one dizzying, overwhelming moment, he was thrown back to when Mary used to yank them out by the handful.  
Once the tiny feathers have appeased Kevin’s sense of direction, longer ones take their place on the stumps of bone, which are growing longer by the day. They look disproportionate at first, like full-grown apples on a drooping sapling branch, but every time Neil flexes them, they feel longer.

Neil's never let them get this big before. They're a weight on his back, and every time he turns, he sees a glimpse of colour in his peripheral vision that he hasn't got used to yet. They're a different colour to what he expected too – the little scrubby bits he plucks out when he cut them off were usually soft white down, with a little colour curling at the edges, but the larger feathers grow in a dusty peach colour at first before they darken to a dark auburn that matches his hair. Well, his actual hair, not the fading dark dye he's got at the moment.

Neil spends his time figuring how to pull his weight with the rest of the camp. There’s no point him helping to set up the tents, because it’s so much quicker to hover and tie them up.

“We’re always grateful for another hand,” says Dan with a shit eating grin as she hands Neil a hand trowel to dig latrines away from the camp.

They keep themselves busy. Someone has to gather food every day and turn it into something edible – Kevin’s an expert on the kinds of plants and bugs that are edible, and every so often they set animal traps – and someone else has to make sure there’s water around. Neil discovers quickly that he;s not very fond of camping.

They’ve got to keep the solar panels charged, and everyone takes a turn on the hand generator. Signal is spotty, but they can usually get some kind of reception, and they take turns doing research on what other hide-outs might work well, what rumours are floating around in the scientific world – to see if anyone else knows of their existence – and, bizarrely, a serious amount of online gambling.

“How else do you think we’re funding a profligate life on the run?” asks Matt with amusement. (Matt doesn’t do any of the actual gambling himself, but Andrew is really, really good at it.) Neil thinks about the tens of thousands in cash he’s got shoved into his duffel bag, and his stashes across the country that add up to another quarter million, and says nothing.

By virtue of being the only person who can still hide their wings, Neil gets volunteered for grocery shopping; Matt drops him off near a town and Neil jogs in. His normal attempt at grocery shopping would probably involve tins of dubious meat, and things that don't go off, but there's nowhere for them to deposit that sort of waste in the forest, so he ends up with a lot of fresh produce and things that come in paper or cardboard containers instead - they can occasionally dump a bag of that at a campsite without being too conspicuous.

He also gets some necessities for himself – a proper sleeping bag and some new underwear. More t-shirts, so he can rip the backs out, and some more canvas and rope so they can extend the tent he’s been sharing with Matt. He leaves laden down with two bags in each hand, plus a rucksack on the front of his chest.

He'd wanted to bring his duffel bag with him; he hasn't let that thing out of his sight since Mary died, but couldn't figure out how to do it without arousing suspicion. Matt brings Nicky and Dan to help carry all the groceries and Neil back to the camp, and Nicky spends the whole way distressingly enthusiastic about cookies. It's been a long time since he had cookies. Or, as he says, "Anything but Kevin's paleo plant shit."

One wing grows a bit faster than the other, and they get in the way all the fucking time. "You'll get used to it," Kevin says, repeatedly, getting more irritated each time he has to. These days, he can manage to move them independently, though it's still nothing more than a bit of a shake. They reach his elbows after only one month, even though Renee, who has the smallest wingspan, has wings that reach past the end of her arms when outstretched.

Matt's are the largest, enormous things that jut out a foot over his already-not-inconsiderable height, and a wingspan that's twice his armspan. He jokes, calls them a pain, especially cooped up here in the trees where there's no space for him to actually stretch them, but Neil's seen him rise above the treetops with Dan, lift off with just a few sweeps of enormous wings. Neil can't imagine having that much power in his back muscles.

"It's not your back muscles," corrects Aaron, who pokes Neil in the chest with his head cocked to one side, listening, even though he can't stand to be around Neil the rest of the time. "You need to develop everything. Abs, shoulders, pecs, arms."

Neil wonders why he's being so helpful - okay, he seems to be the assigned medic of the group, but this is different to mopping up the blood and pus that leaks from Neil's back, because his body isn't used to this much weight hanging off it. Aaron's lips thin when he sees Neil's expression. "You'll slow us down if we have to move."

And that there is another thing that Neil hadn't expected. He watches, from the closest brand, as the others carry out drills. Flying formations, in groups of two, three, four and all together. They're not necessarily good at it – too much bickering and not enough teamwork – but Neil suspects that this is the sort of group that will come together in order to face something else when it comes along. Kevin catches Neil watching and mistakes it for curiosity; he starts filling Neil in on what the formations are, what the different orders mean.

Sometimes, Andrew joins Neil on his perch. Neil hates it when that happens; Andrew will just swoop in, tuck his wings under him and land before Neil can climb away.

"Whose fault is it you can't do that?" says Andrew when Neil tells him to let him past, once.

"Shouldn't you be training?" asks Neil, hoping to divert attention off himself.

Andrew wafts a hand. "They're doing so well without me," he says, deadpan. Neil can see the bulging vein in Kevin's forehead from here, even though he doesn't bother to come make Andrew practice.

Neil stretches his wings – they've grown out enough that there's another joint now, so technically he has the whole shape of a wing, but they still can't hold his weight.

It takes three months for Neil's wings to grow back properly. He's been doing some body conditioning for the rest of it; like Aaron said, abs, shoulders, pecs, arms, and his torso's finally got used to four limbs stretching out of it, even if he does sometimes move a wing when he means an arm, or the other way around. Kevin teaches him how to do the pruning, choosing which crooked feathers to pull out to make the rest grow straight, all the time sounding like Neil is a complete moron, but it does make a difference. Neil can stretch his wings out now, and feel the wind slide through them, all streamlined as they should be.

Of course, that’s when Kevin tells him that he needs to start learning how to fly.

 

 

 

Neil falls off the branch, and frantically reaches for the next; he misses it, and thumps to the ground. Somewhere above him, he can hear Andrew laughing softly.

Kevin settles on the dirt next to him. "That was abysmal."

"You know what," says Neil as he stands, brushing himself down more viciously than he really needs to. "Thanks for that observation. I couldn't tell."

"Again," says Kevin, and without even asking, scoops his hands under Neil's armpits, and lifts him back up to the branch. Neil lashes out instinctively – he hasn't had someone touch him without it being an attack for a long time now – and Kevin yelps, drops him. Neil lands on the branch and clutches at it before he falls, and Kevin retreats a safe distance away.

"Don't," says Neil, struggling for words that don’t give too much away. "Don't grab me."

"You need to get over that," says Kevin, but Neil notes that he is still out of reach. Behind him, on his left, Andrew is glaring at Neil.

Neil googles ‘how baby birds learn to fly’ on their shitty slow internet when it’s his turn to watch the security feeds. It’s not really that helpful.

“I’ll teach you,” says Renee, and Neil hastily closes down the browser even though he kno.ws she's already seen it.

"It's fine," says Neil. "I'll pick it up."

"I'm sure you will," says Renee serenely, "but it is quicker when someone teaches you properly."

A corner of Neil's mouth quirks up before he can stop it. "You don't think Kevin's teaching it properly?"

"I think Kevin is teaching you the way he was taught."

Neil thinks about that for a moment. "Probably."

"Kevin was a child, who had grown up always with the use of his wings. It's different learning to use them as independent limbs if you've never used them like that before."

Neil's curiosity is, admittedly, alight. "And you didn't grow up with them?"

Renee shakes her head. "I did, but I didn't grow up using them."

Settling the laptop onto his knees more securely, Neil keeps one eye on the security feeds as he asks, "What do you mean?"

"I grew up in the outside world.”

“How?” Neil is stunned at the idea that any of the genetics labs would let a subject get away.

“My mom never said. And then she died. My foster mom found me and took me in. She wasn’t expecting me to have wings, I suspect, but she coped with it really well. Homeschooled me so I wouldn’t have to go outside during the daytime. I taught myself how to use them so I could look for the others."

“You deliberately left home to find them?"

Renee nods. " I needed to know whether there were more kids like me. My foster mom thought there would be.”

Neil mulls this over in his head. He can’t understand why Renee would leave what sounded like a peaceful, loving family situation to come and sit in damp trees.

She continues. “So, I can teach you how to use them. And Andrew can as well."

Neil tears his eyes away from the screen to scrutinise Renee's face. "Just Andrew. Not Andrew and Aaron."

"That's not my story to tell," says Renee gently. "But yes, just Andrew."

Neil twitches his wings. It would be really nice to be able to fly. Every day his wings feel stronger, he wishes he knew how to use them properly. "Then alright. After my shift, you should teach me how to fly."

Renee nods, and slips away. Neil has another three hours attached to the computer, but his eyes slide over to Andrew, and Aaron, and thinks over the little tidit that Renee has just fed him.

It seems like Andrew can always sense when someone is watching him, so he swivels around from where he's reading a book to look at Neil, eyebrows already raised. Neil mock-salutes him, and watches as he flicks his wings to join Neil on his branch.

"Renee was just saying that you could teach me how to fly," says Neil pleasantly. 'Pleasantly' is Neil's most passive-aggressive demeanour.

Andrew's expression doesn't change. "Was she."

"She was." Neil doesn't even know how it ends up this way, but he and Andrew are having this strange stare-off all of a sudden.

"And what," says Andrew softly, "will you do for me if I help you?"

"You could just help me out of the kindness of your heart," says Neil, his face twisting into a laugh even as he says it. He knows that Andrew knows that neither of them think people do anything out of the kindness of their hearts. "What do you want from me?"

"I want you," says Andrew as he pulls his legs up so he can stand up on the branch. He watches him from beneath hooded eyelids, his head tilted as if he's examining Neil's reaction, "to tell me where you got that quarter of a million dollars in cash you've got in your bag."

Neil nearly falls off his branch, and it's only Andrew's vice-grip around his bicep that stops him from actually doing so. "What the fuck were you doing in my bag!" His voice pitches loud enough that a couple of the others turn around.

Andrew smiles at him, and in one smooth movement, he’s got his arms around Neil’s waist, his chest against Neil’s back between his wings and Neil feels rather than sees enormous black wings flap around them both once, twice and they’re in the air. Neil struggles automatically, until he hears Andrew’s voice, bored, next to his ear, “If I drop you, do you think you can learn to fly before you hit the ground?”

It goes against all his instincts, but Neil makes himself still. He grapples his mind around the situation. “My bag,” he grits out. “What were you doing in my bag?”

"Counting the amount of money you've got hidden amongst your underwear, that's what."

Neil flushes red; goddamnit, he can't help that sort of angry physiological reaction, and this is exactly why he hates talking to Andrew. He always feels like he's losing whatever damn competition they've got going on between them.

"What is it you're hiding from us? Because I thought we already had this conversation already, Na - na -Nathaniel," says Andrew, and his voice has settled into a strange sing-song that is so much more terrifying than a second ago.

"Don't call me that," says Neil, a strange curdling feeling in his stomach starting just from hearing his old name, his father's name. "I had the cash when I arrived, I didn't exactly get it after we had the last little chat."

"And where does a fugitive get this much money?"

"My mom had it," says Neil. He can still feel the heat emanating off his face. "She stole it from my father to fund my escape, our escape."  
Andrew’s breath is warm on Neil’s ear. “So it’s not, for example, because you are working with the Moriyamas and letting them know where we are?”

The Moriyamas are the family who own Evermore. Their main business is pharmaceuticals, but some interesting chemicals come out medical research, and some of that involves experimentation on human and animal cells. The genetic experimentation is the domain of the branch family, run by Tetsuji. Neil remembers the way his smile never reached his eyes.

“No,” snaps Neil. “I would never work with them.”

“Prove it.”

“In the bag, there’s a notebook.”

“I remember.”

“There’s still some money my mom stole that isn’t in cash. If I have to get some more out, the notebook –”

“It’s in code.”

Anger flares again in Neil that Andrew’s gone through his stuff, all his stuff in the world, so thoroughly. “Yeah, because I’m not a fucking idiot. It’s in code so only I can get it out. It’s all in my mom’s name.”

“With that much money, you could buy somewhere discreet and live out the rest of your days in peace.”

“Not with the Moriyamas after me. As long as they’ve got people, they’ll come running after me.”

Andrew doesn’t immediately answer. Neil takes a moment to survey the scene before him. It’s beautiful, he guesses, but he’s still acutely aware of the sharp wind slicing through his skin, reminding him how high up he is.

“‘ _As long as they’ve got people_ ’. Oh, Neil.” Andrew laughs softly. Neil doesn’t get why on earth that would be funny to Andrew. “You’ve got bigger ambitions than running for the rest of your life, don’t you?”

Andrew’s just started to lower Neil back into the tree when Dan flies up to meet them, her face contorted with concern.

“Andrew! What are you doing?” Her tone says that she knows exactly what the fuck Andrew’s been doing, but Andrew just releases one arm to wave at her. Neil’s stomach drops, and Dan lets out a gasp, but Andrew’s remaining arm is solid around his waist, and his wings are flapping only slightly faster than they do normally – Neil takes an incredulous moment to admire Andrew’s strength.

“Just teaching Neil how to fly,” says Andrew cheerfully as he sets Neil back down on their original branch.

Dan’s expression implies that she doesn’t believe him for a hot second, but she still says, “Neil?”

“I’m fine. Renee said he might be a better teacher than Kevin.”

Dan’s expression implies that she doesn’t think that’s true either, but she lets them be, dropping warily down to the branch below them – just in case Andrew pushes him off, Neil guesses.

Andrew disappears as Neil is re-orientating himself, and he’s left to ruminate on the last thing that Andrew said. Bigger ambitions. He snorts – he’s never allowed himself to dream of more than, well, this. This isn’t so bad.

 

 

 

Andrew does actually help teach Neil how to fly. He and Renee take turns. Neil had expected Andrew to sit by and make unhelpful comments, but instead he gets Neil to stretch out his wings and isolate muscle groups. He explains what each bit of the wing does, and how to affect strength, speed, direction.

Four months after Neil joined the group, everything finally clicks, and he flies.

 

 

 

It's the middle of the night when Neil is woken. Someone is roughly shaking his shoulders and Neil punches at him.

"Whoa, whoa, it’s me, Matt," says Matt, his silhouette with two hands in the air as he backs away. "Come on, we need to go. The first alarm's been triggered."

Neil doesn't question it, he just rolls out of his sleeping bag and starts rolling it up.

Most of the things that Neil brought with him are already in his duffel bag, so he pulls a sweater on over his pyjamas and something a bit warmer for his lower half, jamming feet into shoes with no socks. The sleeping bag fits into his duffel bag, just about, when Neil realises that they're stripping down the tents as well.

It looks like everyone knows what they're doing – Matt rolls up the canvas, tying it up as he goes, and Renee yanks all the poles into one bundle. They bundle everything into these enormous bags and Neil jiggles his leg, impatient. "This is going to weigh us down."

"We need to take as much as we can with us," says Dan, pitching her voice low. "We can't afford to keep buying or salvaging new supplies every new place we go to. And if we share the load, we can hold it between us and fly it out."

This sort of thing makes Neil nervous. He's used to packing light and moving as soon as possible, but it's true that they can't exactly roll up at the nearest motel. They're hardly inconspicuous when all together.

"Also, dogs, remember," says Matt, slightly out of breath as he hurries to get pots and pans and various knick knacks stuffed away. "They can sniff us out with dogs if we leave anything."

Neil doesn't say anything, just helps him hold everything down so he can tie it all up.

They're done quicker than he thought they would be, even if it's longer than he would have liked, and by the time they're done, so are Andrew's lot, a similar sort of large canvas rolled up into a sausage with everything tied into the middle of it. Andrew and Kevin are missing, only turning up a couple of moments later with the deactivated electrical fence poles.

"Left a few traps," says Kevin shortly. "We're running out."

They get into formation. Kevin goes at the front, with Dan and Matt behind him. Nicky, Aaron, Allison and Renee form up behind them, with the weight of the two large packs distributed between them, and Andrew takes up the rear. It looks like they've done this before, like they've practiced before. It looks an awful lot like the formation of a flock of birds. Andrew points to the spot beside him, and Neil joins him there. Neil does not want to fly next to him.

"You need the help," says Kevin, and they start to take off before Neil can protest. He flaps his wings hurriedly to keep up with them, and it's not until they're in the air that he realises what that means. He knew, vaguely, that birds flew in formation for a reason. He remembers it was one of those facts he had learned as part of his general science education, but it's not until he's here, behind and in between Allison and Renee, that he understands it. He's much better than when Andrew first shoved him off a branch, but he's still a novice at finding the right angle so that his wings cut through the wind smoothly, isn't adept at catching the currents and riding them up.  It's much easier flying in a flock though.

Allison and Renee block the air in front of him, and when they flap their wings, he uses the breeze of that to help keep himself aloft. They're high above the treetops and almost a mile away before Neil lets himself look down. He's never been this far up before.

"Do you also need the help?" asks Neil, the wind whipping his voice out of his mouth even as he says the words.

Andrew smiles mirthlessly at him. "You get to carry the flock when everyone else is exhausted," he says. "You'd better be ready."

He hadn't thought of it like that.

Then there's a whirring noise that takes Neil a moment to place – it's coming from behind them, and it's loud, getting louder, and oh, shit. It's a helicopter.

"EVASIVE MANOEUVRES," bellows Dan from the front. Andrew's suddenly right next to him, his hand clamped around Neil's forearm as he drags Neil in the same direction as him.

They peel off towards the right, deliberately heading closer to the ground. Kevin, Nicky and Aaron join them – Dan, Matt, Renee and Alison dive to the left. Neil hasn’t practised this with them, and even though Kevin had explained it, he’s already one step behind as he struggles with his wings.

“Flare out,” snaps Andrew, and Neil unfurls his wings as wide as they will go.

“What the fuck?” screeches Kevin from in front of them. “He can’t steer like that!”

Andrew ignores him, and drifts up so that he’s directly above Neil. “You don’t have the manoeuvrability,” he tells Neil shortly. “Keep yourself up and I can steer you.”

“Sure,” says Neil, for lack of anything else to say.

Andrew tucks himself down onto Neil’s back, like that day he’d hauled Neil into the air. This time, it’s different though; Neil’s wings are outstretched, giving them glide, and Andrew’s hands on his waist keeps them parallel. It must work, because Kevin’s stopped making annoyed squawks in front of them, and has taken them down towards the fields.

It’s not ideal – the cover here is patchy, and the helicopter followed them instead of the others, but it’s a clear area also means weaving back and forth like a drunk chicken is easier. They end up over a farm, and Kevin immediately dives. Nicky swears, and follows; together, they whip around the corner of a fence, then another.

Neil has no choice but to trust Andrew as they weave in and out of the buildings. Kevin finally spots what he’s been looking out for; a barn, with the door left open. They zoom inside and haul themselves around – “Don’t land,” Andrew says in Neil’s ear – and head straight back out in the opposite direction when the helicopter flies overhead.

It’s a risky move – it’s harder to build up momentum for them, but the helicopter isn’t as quick to turn corners and Kevin takes advantage of that. Andrew’s chest is hot against Neil’s back, and he can feel his ribcage expanding and contracting as exertion sets in. They dive and duck once more before shaking the helicopter.

There’s not much else around aside from the freeway, but Neil spots a gas station and points it out to Andrew. “Gas station!” he bellows.

“Why –”

“Gas station, Kevin.” Andrew overrides Kevin’s protests, but Kevin steers them towards it. They land, and hope desperately that no one was looking in that direction.

“How does this help?” hisses Kevin desperately as Neil shoves them all around the back of it, where there are no windows and no one’s going to see them.

Neil points at Nicky and Aaron, who had been carrying the large pack with the tent and supplies. Both of them are leaning over and wheezing. “They’re exhausted. There’s no other cover for miles around. Come _on_.”

Neil peers around the side. He’s looking for something specific and spots it quickly. A medium sized van. Single driver, no passengers, just went inside to use the bathroom, pay for gas and maybe pick up some gas. Door’s closed, but the window’s been left open for air. Perfect.

“Lend me your jacket,” he tells Nicky, half grappling it off Nicky as he pants.

He drapes it over his wings. It looks stupid, he’s sure, but it’s better than nothing. He glances in through the window of the shop, and sure enough the driver is browsing in one of the back aisles. He reaches in through the window and pops the door open. His lucky day; the keys are still in ignition. He eases the van over to the tyre pump area – close enough to where the others are. They pile in, Andrew into the passenger seat and Kevin, Nicky and Aaron into the back.

“Cover your faces,” Neil advises, and floors it out of there.

They don’t keep the van for long – the security camera at the gas station will have caught the license plate, even if they all draped coats and jackets over their heads to avoid being detected. The van has GPS, and Kevin leans into the front to figure out where they are, and where they need to get to.

As soon as they get to an area with enough trees, they ditch the van and get back into the air, this time splitting the load between each of them individually.

“We’ll rendezvous with the others in three days,” says Kevin. “If anyone’s still on our trail, we don’t want to lead them to a potential safe area with the others in.”

“Our trail,” says Aaron, stretching out one wing and massaging it. “You sure you don’t mean his trail?” He jerks his chin towards Neil. “That helicopter didn’t even try to go after the others.”

“Oh, come on,” says Nicky. “They could just have easily have been after Kevin. Or even me and you.” Neil notices abstractly that Nicky doesn’t think anyone could be after Andrew.

“Your wing,” says Andrew suddenly. He’s talking to Aaron, the full force of his attention fixed on him. Neil’s been on the end of that pin-point focus before, and the weight of even the periphery of it weighs him down.

Aaron shakes his head minutely. “Cramps, I think,” he says shortly, rolling his shoulders.

“Be sure.”

“You don’t practice enough, that’s why.” Kevin’s capable of scorn, even at a time like this.

Aaron scowls, and ignores him. “All I know is that we’ve now abandoned two camps because of him.”

“I’m right here,” says Neil. “And I’ve been with you guys for almost six months now. You should have moved camps anyway, six months in any one place is just asking for trouble.”

Aaron scowls at him but says nothing.

 

 

 

"You and Aaron have different wings," says Neil, that night. They’ll be sleeping on the ground for once, tucked behind a dense copse of bushes. They’ve tried to unpack as little as possible, so that means just the sleeping bags, with everything else still packed up and close by for convenience.

Andrew raises an eyebrow: that much is at least, obvious. Neil had noticed it, in an abstract way, but it wasn’t until today when Aaron spent ten minutes stretching it out before he oculd move it properly.

Aaron has wings that are streamlined against his back. The feathers are long and slim, a myriad of browns that blend into each other. It's a modest wingspan, but their smaller size allows him to manoeuvre more easily, which Neil has seen when they've been out and about. Aaron is one of the few of them truly comfortable under the treetops, swift enough to move between them.

Andrew's wings, on the other hand, are enormous. All the feathers are black and they're much thicker, fuller than Aaron's. They catch the wind and lift him high with barely a flap, and there's no way he could manage to spread them out fully under the trees. It matches, somehow. Andrew has his t-shirt sleeves rolled up to his shoulders, and Neil's seen him exercising, the muscles of his arms straining in a way that Aaron never bothers with.

“You have eyes, well done.”

It’s actually something that Neil’s been meaning to bring up for a while now – since Andrew picked him up, at least, and then there was Renee’s comment about it too. “You’re twins, I would have expected you to have the same wings.”

"Twins are exciting scientific news," says Andrew. "Do you know why?"

"No."

"They're the same," says Andrew, his voice dry as if he's talking about the results of a paper on the growth of mould, rather than experiments he lived through himself. "Genetically. If you raise them in the same environment, then any biological differences are down to changes in condition."

It sounds like something someone told Andrew, once, twice, his entire childhood.

Andrew's fingers twitch, for the first time betraying some emotion. Neil doesn't know which emotion, yet, but then Andrew turns around and pulls down the back of his t-shirt so Neil can see the skin surrounding his wings.

Neil doesn't flinch. No, he goes awfully, awfully still instead. Andrew's back is riddled with white puckered scars, large and slashing across his back, all stemming from his shoulder blades. His wings look like someone pulled them off someone else and sewed them onto his back. They're in a slightly different place to Neil's; they're not a double joint extension coming out of his shoulders, like an extra set of limbs would be, but placed too closely together on his back, like a human's crude understanding of where wings should go, rather than where they would if humans had the right muscles for it. Now Neil knows why Andrew does so much strength training for his upper body. His wings _are_ too big for him, because he didn't grow them.

"Can I touch them?" Neil raises a hand.

Andrew pauses for a moment. "No."

Neil drops his hand. But Andrew isn't turning away, he's letting Neil look his fill, so he takes half a step closer to examine them. The skin of Andrew's back grows over the end of the wings, swallowing the white bone unevenly, but it looks like there have been skin grafts too.

"Where did they get the wings from?" Neil asks.

Andrew turns, and pulls his t-shirt back on. "Grew them in a test tube."

"Why?"

"It's a lot less work and money if you can grow wings in a test tube and attach them to an existing human body. Otherwise you have to grow the entire hybrid human."

Neil feels a little like throwing up. He has scars on his body too, bad ones, but they're from people wanting to hurt him. There was feeling behind them. It's not just so they could satisfy some – what, scientific curiosity? Cost cutting initiative?

"Thank you," he says instead, which is all he can say for Andrew trusting him enough to bare his back.

"They'll be making more of them," says Andrew, as if he hadn't heard.

 

 

 

The others are at the rendezvous point already by the time they arrive. They look worried and tired, but not too bad off otherwise.

“You made it!” Dan waves at them.

Nicky flops over onto the mossy ground with a groan. “Barely. Getting away from that helicopter wiped me out.”

“They’re getting better,” says Dan solemnly. “That’s the first time they’ve used a helicopter.”

“What do they usually use?” asks Neil.

“This is the closest they’ve got,” admits Renee. “Most of the time, we move on before they catch up to us. And we’re limited in where we can go, how far we can fly in one go without being spotted, and how often we go back to old sites.”

“This needs to stop,” says Neil. “I’m sick of running. We can’t do it forever.”

“What are you suggesting?” asks Aaron, incredulously.

“We do something about it. Make them stop. Expose them. Something. Anything.”

“You’ve been running, same as us. Why haven’t you done anything by yourself?”

“Because I’ve been by myself,” says Neil. “I didn’t have the resources or manpower to do anything. Why haven’t you guys done anything?”

Dan frowns. “We aren’t here to fight them. We just want to be left alone, to live our lives in peace.”

“But they’re never going to leave you alone, that’s my point.”

Dan’s shaking her head now, but it’s not a no, it’s consideration. “It’s a huge feat. There are multiple labs competing with this research. I mean, you and Kevin are from Evermore, and the rest of us all came through different institutes. It’s all high security, they’ve got people and tech on their side. We’d need to research their facilities, figure out how to sabotage them or expose them, and get out again. We need time, and people, and money.”

“Well, we’ve got time,” says Neil. “It’s not like we’re doing anything else. And I think I can help with the money bit too.”

And with that, they’ve got the beginnings of a plan.

There are moments, when it’s night and the sky is clear and the stars bright, when even the buzzing of the forest dulls to a hum, when Neil actually finds himself looking around and thinking that this is beautiful.

The rest of the time, when he’s huddled together with eight other people, four of whom haven’t gone down to the river and washed themselves that day, obeying increasingly frantic orders from Kevin as they fly, when the mosquitos come out to play or when the rain starts splattering fat drops down through the leaves, Neil wonders why the hell he’s here. Why didn’t he just keep running by himself, or buy a house in the middle of nowhere with cash and hide out.

They try not to wander too far from their camp – it makes getting back in a hurry difficult, and it increases the area where other people might find them – and that gets claustrophobic for a boy who’s spent the last year by himself, and the years before that with just his mother.

Neil takes himself away from that every so often; sometimes he drops to the ground and lies on the floor, glad to feel solid ground underneath him even if he does have to painstakingly wipe his tracks afterwards. Sometimes it means volunteering to take the night watch, and heading off to the tent he shares with Matt in the middle of the day. And sometimes, he likes to take himself to the tree tops, and remind himself that he’s got his wings back.

This is one of those days. Neil half climbs, half flaps his way out of the canopy of trees to find Andrew with his back against the tree trunk, his legs stretched out in front of him. Neil pauses, and makes to find another tree, but Andrew waves his hand at the neighbouring branch mockingly.

Neil settles down with his shoulder pressing against Andrew’s even as they look out on different views.

Andrew doesn’t talk like the others – the others banter, or ask him questions about himself, and he never knows quite how to answer and stop the conversation, but Andrew doesn’t talk unless he has a reason to.

It seems like he doesn’t have a reason to today, but every so often, Neil feels his gaze on him, even though he can never quite manage to catch him doing it when he turns his face.

Neil’s trying to draw out a floor plan of what he remembers of Evermore. He mostly remembers the residential areas – where they keep the kids with wings – and the medical wing, a mixture of laboratory and clinic for the subjects. Kevin’s helping out; since he’s got more recent memories of it, they’re confident it’s going to be pretty accurate.

Andrew is doing the actual drawing, because neither Neil nor Kevin can draw even a wonky line, when Aaron drops his notebook between them all. Andrew nudges it open with the end of his pencil.

Aaron's been doing some research. He’s been hogging the laptop for a few days, taking it out to the edge of the forest with the wi-fi hotspot in the hopes of scrounging up slightly better signal, but he’d said that it was important.

It lies in front of them now, his notebook open to reveal neat, orderly handwriting. There have been a spat of missing people cases in the last year or so. The local police haven't put anything together because there have only been a few cases from each city, but they're all cities within a few hours' drive of the Evermore Research Institute. They're all teenagers, reasonably athletic but not so noticeable that there's going to be huge public outcry if they're gone. Kids from state schools, middle-of-the-road kids. Orphans and kids in foster care.

“Some of them will be normal missing people cases,” explains Aaron, “but I’m sure there’s a connection between the rest.”

“Missing kids. Why do we care?” That’s Andrew, and his tone is dismissive but he looks at the notebook, reads it, so Neil knows he cares.

“Not everyone has a twin,” says Aaron.

Andrew stills. Uses his pencil to flip the notebook shut again.

Nicky frowns, confused. “I don’t get it? What do you mean, not everyone has a twin?”

“Andrew was a success story,” says Kevin briskly. “It’s likely that once they realised they could transplant wings onto existing live human beings, that became an off-shoot of the experimentation. There are advantages to being able to graft lab-grown wings onto a person rather than raising them from birth.”

“Careful,” says Matt, his voice deliberately light. “You’re starting to sound like them.”

Andrew looks down the list of names and faces and jabs his pencil at Matt. “No. He’s not.”

There’s awkward silence for a while. Everyone’s processing the bombshell that Aaron dropped on them. It’s a good lead to have, Neil just isn’t sure what to do about it. They could perhaps try and leak that the research facility is kidnapping people to the press, but they’d need evidence that it’s happening; they need to find the missing people and get proof that they were kidnapped.

There’s a _crunch_ into the silence and everyone jumps a little at the sound. Nicky laughs nervously, betraying the tension that everyone else is also carrying. It’s Andrew: he’s pressed his pencil into the paper so hard that the lead had broken. He flicks the offending bit away and sharpens it without batting an eyelid.

“Okay, look. We’ll think about it and see what to do with this info” says Dan. “In the meantime, let’s carry on with what we know.”

She’s good in a pinch, thinks Neil. Calm, reassuring, focussed on an action plan. Even Andrew takes notice of her.

“What’s next?” asks Renee, picking up the vibe and cajoling them along.

Neil thinks about it. “There’s the administrative block, which we were never allowed into, and the hospital block.”

“I thought that was the hospital block,” says Alison, pointing to the clinic/lab area Andrew’s already drawn in detail.

“That acts for the hospital for the – subjects. Us. This is the hospital block for the mothers.”

“Mothers?” asks Alison sharply.

Neil looks at her blankly. “Yes?”

“What mothers?”

“The mothers. Of the babies.”

Alison looks ready to murder him, but he doesn’t know what bit of this she isn’t understanding. It seems completely obvious to him.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa, hold up,” says Matt, physically putting a hand between them so that Neil’s gaze is drawn towards him. “You’re telling me that there are mothers giving birth to babies with wings? Is that what you’re trying to say?”

“Yeah,” says Neil. “Where else are the babies coming from?”

The rest of them look at him, wide-eyed.

“I was incubated in a test tube,” says Dan.

“Me too,” says Nicky, and gestures at the twins. “We think I’m biologically cousins with these two, but it’s not the usual concept of family.”

“They don’t do that at Evermore. Or maybe they do, I don’t know. But most of us arrive as babies. They run a fertility clinic for mothers who have trouble conceiving as a cover. They announced some sort of experimental miracle cure and they had rich, desperate parents signing up in droves to participate. They'd take unfertilised eggs out of the mothers, infuse them with the hybrid DNA and fertilise them, inject them back into the mothers.

“They use the women to incubate the foetuses, and keep them in as inpatients for the last couple of months, because it’s still an ‘experimental procedure’. They'd tell the mothers that the procedure failed, they lost their baby, and then keep the baby and raise them in the lab."

A row of shocked faces stare back at him.

"That's horrific," says Dan, her face pale. "Women are paying to participate in this?"

Neil nods. "It's how they fund everything. It’s not exactly government sanctioned. The women go home thinking they’ve miscarried, or they shell out more money and try it again."

"What the actual shit fuck?" says Alison, her lips curled into a snarl. "Why didn't you mention this sooner?"

"I didn't – I thought you knew."

"They don't tell us lab birds anything, you dumb fuck."

"It’s all right," says Renee, setting her hand on Alison's arm as if to placate her.

"My mother found out. That's how she discovered me and broke me out," says Neil, though that’s the very short version of what happened. He doesn’t mention his father’s involvement in all of this. "There must be other records as well, of which women had which babies. That's got to be in there somewhere."

"But we need to do something to stop this, right? We need to put an end of this?" Nicky’s eyes are wide, and he sounds so uncertain.

"We're going." Andrew's voice drops into the fray and immediately silences everything else. Dan, Matt and Allison look surprised, and Neil is surprised that they’re surprised.

 

 

 

Dan kind of moves into their tent. She wasn’t really trying to, but Neil spends an evening arguing tactics with Kevin in the big tent, the one with Andrew’s lot, and when he goes back to his own, Dan and Matt are crammed into Matt’s hammock. They’re kissing a lot, in the sort of way that suggests that this isn’t the first time.

“Oh,” says Neil. He hadn’t seen this coming at all. For one thing, he notes mentally that those hammocks are snug enough for a man of Matt’s size, let alone a whole other person.

Neil does the only thing he can think of, which is to reverse out before they can finish spluttering and climbing out after him, and goes back to Andrew’s lot.

He kind of moves into their tent.

 

 

 

Kevin takes his patrol duty seriously; Neil drops down to the ground as he’s rigging up some basic trip wires and traps, and silently joins in.

It’s not long before Kevin broaches the subject first. “I assumed you died. I can’t believe you managed to evade capture for this long.”

“It was my mom at first. I wouldn’t have managed to pass among humans without her.”

Kevin twitches, and makes an aborted gesture that Neil presumes is his attempt to be sensitive.

“I don’t mean the wings,” says Neil. “Not just the wings, anyway. She grew up on the outside. Normal humans... she understood them. Things they never taught us while we were inside, like how to use public transport, or rush hours, or, I don’t know, the weird TV shows teenagers are meant to watch so you know what people are talking about. I wouldn’t have survived without that.”

Kevin nods, but Neil knows that he doesn’t know, not really. He might have escaped the clutches of Evermore, but he still hasn’t had a chance to lead a life. As meagre a facsimile of a normal life as it was, at least Neil has experienced some of it.

“I assumed you were still at Evermore,” says Neil. “You were always the top of the class.”

“Riko was the top of the class,” says Kevin, so quickly that it’s almost a reflex.

“I remember him. Why did you leave him?” Neil remembers them being best friends, inseparable. The best that the institution had to offer. And yet, Kevin escaped with Andrew, not Riko.

“Riko is Evermore through and through.” Kevin looks studiously down at his hands as he talks. “He... He’s everything that Evermore wanted me to be. He’s one of them.”

Neil grimaces. The one thing that they could count on in the stark corridors and poor disguised cell bedrooms was a silent solidarity between all the kids when it came to the people who worked at Evermore. It was the subjects versus the scientists, the kids against the adults. “That’s just stupid. He got experimented on more than anyone.”

“He wants to be his father’s son.”

“He’s a Moriyama in name only,” says Neil dismissively. He should know – he might be the son of one of the investors in Evermore, but his father had never looked at him as anything other than a return on investment.

“I know,” says Kevin wearily, “but he would never accept it.”

Neil changes the subject. “How did you find this lot?”

“We were doing an exchange. There was a knowledge sharing programme between the labs – Moriyamas were looking at buying out some of their competitors, but I was sent across so they could study various developments that they hadn’t made in their research yet, and then Andrew was meant to come to Evermore. We escaped the day before, when the security was lowest.”

“I never knew there were other labs doing the same thing. How wide-spread do you think this is?”

Kevin raises one shoulder in a shrug. “Two months after that, the acquisition went through, and the Moriyamas cleansed the whole facility. Dan and Matt were the only ones to make it out.”

Neil winces. “Cleansed.”

“Everyone from the babies to the staff who worked there was killed.”

“And now we’re going after them,” says Neil with a thin smile.

“Now you know what you’re up against.”

“I’ve always known,” says Neil, and thinks of a car with his mother’s body in, burning on the beach, and dark streaks of blood staining the cuticles around his nails even after he scrubbed his hands clean.

 

 

 

The next time the alarm trips, it's in the middle of the day.

"I don't see anything," says Alison, whose turn it is on the computers, "but three cams spotted movement. Move it, people."

They strip down the camp with military efficiency.

But this time, they were prepared. Neil is stuffing the last of his things into his pack when he smells it – and he's not the only one. Renee and Alison, one tree over, their heads snap up at the same time as Neil's.

"Smoke," says Renee, clearly but calmly. "I smell smoke."

Shit. They grab their stuff and drop down to the lower branches; smoke rises, and they need their lungs to fly.

It's too late though. They discover what has actually been done when they try to duck out through the bushes.  Everything is on fire.

"Go," snaps Matt. "Go around!"

But they can't - the perimeter is in fire. They're closed in; down here, in such a small space, it's hard for them to spread their wings and gain much momentum. Neil flaps from branch to branch, moving upwards with his head buried in the crook of his arm even as the smoke makes his eyes sting. The branches and leaves claw at him as he moves, leaving scrapes in his face as he ploughs through them, but then they start to thin out, and there's more room to maneouvre.

Except they thought of that. In the panic of the fire, Neil hadn't noticed the whirring sound. Stupid. There's a helicopter above, with harnessed people hanging out of the side. A net drop down, right over where Andrew is, and Neil doesn't think once, let alone twice, he launches himself across, shove Andrew out of the way, his bag sliding off his shoulder as he does so. The net slings across him, the weighted ends wrapping themselves around him and crushing his wings to his back, and then there's a jolt, and Neil is being hauled upwards, the last sight of Andrew he sees a furious glare.

Neil thrashes in the hold of the net but it doesn't do anything. He doesn't have any weapons on him so he can't cut his way out - his chance to escape is when they unwrap the net. He gained enhanced strength along with the hollow bones and wings; he's sure he can't fight off at least one or two people.

Except, they don't give him the chance. Something is stabbed into the meat of his thigh when he's reeled in hard enough, and Neil gasps. They wait, the net slowly rotating in thin air as the helicopter rises, away from the treetops and the others. He can see them, trying to fly up to him, but they're thwarted as more nets drop down on them. Aaron narrowly misses getting caught by one, and Dan drags Renee from another, and then slowly they're smaller and smaller specks in the distance, and Neil's vision is going blurry. Shit. Well, at least they didn't catch any of the others.

 

Neil wakes in a terribly familiar room. It's much smaller now, than when he was eleven, but he supposes that's to be expected. It had been terrifying when he'd been a child, stark and white and waiting for someone to splatter his blood across the tiles. Now, he can see the paintwork cracking, and the yellowed hues of old tiles. It doesn't frighten him anymore, it just makes him angry.

"I suppose you never thought you'd be back here." That voice is familiar too. It's not quite the same; age has made it deeper, sharper, as if its owner wears the pain in his life in his voice.

“Riko.”

Neil remembers him from only a few encounters as a child, but every kid kept in the compound knew about Riko – self-assured in his abilities and his position among the rest of the kids. He’d been fanatic about scoring well on the tests they were given, be it the physical or the ones in the classroom. He’s the son of Kengo Moriyama, the private investor of this particular genetics lab, and his uncle was the lead scientist when Neil had been here.

There’s something about him that Neil can’t quite put his finger on, a strange gleam in his eyes.

“Imagine my surprise at seeing you again,” says Riko. “Your father gave us his word that he had this all taken care of.”

Neil put effort into that – when Nathan’s men caught up to them, when Mary took her last stand between her husband and her child, Neil had made it look like he had died as well. He doesn’t say anything.

“Still. You were a good specimen, Nathaniel. That attitude will need changing, but we can continue on from where we left.”

“You think you’re so different,” says Neil.

Riko wasn’t the first of them, by any means, but there was a half generation of failures, zygotes that rejected the genetic mutation, babies with birth defects, or didn’t make it past infancy for whatever reason. He came on the tail of those, finally both whole in body and of mind.

"I am a celebration of science." Riko sneers at him, and stretches his wings out. They unfurl like black sails, stark against the whitewashed concrete of the laboratory behind him. "I am the greatest scientific success of this generation. You should be grateful you’re been brought back to work with me instead of being shot on sight."

Neil snorts without thinking. “You think a lot of yourself for a lab rat. Have you ever even been outside?”

Riko doesn’t take kindly to that. “ _You_ are a lab rat. You’ve cost us a lot of time and money, Nathaniel.”

“You’re not a scientist,” Neil points out. “I haven’t cost _you_ anything. Your dad might be Kengo Moriyama, but he doesn’t count you as his son. You don’t own anything in here any more than I do just because my dad helped set this place up.”

“My father.” Riko’s smile thins, and Neil realises that he’s touched upon a sore point by accident. “My father had two sons, and I am the rightful heir of Evermore. It’s mine now.”

 _Kengo’s dead_ , Neil realises. He could almost feel sorry for Riko, if he wasn’t such an obnoxious cock. He’s been restricted to this facility his entire life, treated both as a miracle and a commodity. He’s got the Moriyama name, but nothing else to go with it, and it looks like he’s tried to make this place his domain.

They got the same education, as did all of the kids. Neil remembers reciting reams of math and science, geography and world history. But Neil got to see the world, or parts of it, at least. He went out and met people, lived in cities, found them bewildering and ridiculous. Riko has none of that. His world is so small – and naturally, so is his mind.  
Neil is saved from having to the thought of having an emotion for the circumstances that caused Riko’s state of mind when Riko brings out some thick leather straps. He advances on Neil and Neil tumbles off the medical couch he’d woken up on, staggering away from it – there must be some of the drug left, because the moment he stands, the room swims a little. He ignores it.

“Sit down,” says Riko, almost bored.

“Yeah,” says Neil. “Nope.”

He’s hopeful in that he hasn’t seen any other people around yet. That means he only has to get past Riko. Unfortunately, Riko’s strong. Neil knows, because he lunges forward, propelling by his wings, to grab Neil’s wrists, and forcible drag him back to the couch. Neil can feel steel fingers dig into his wrists and he grits his teeth.

Riko’s strong, but Neil is fast, and wily, and as Riko pulls forward, he suddenly lets himself go with no resistance, and Riko falls backward as Neil shoves himself forward.

He goes for the door. Riko’s on the floor, shouting. The door opens before Neil can get to it, startling both himself and the scientist on the other side of it, but that small delay is enough. Riko grabs a syringe from the fridge and stabs it into Neil’s bicep – his wing bicep, not his arm.

Pain flares up that wing immediately, the muscles spasming and making Neil’s entire side shake. “What the fuck –”

“We’ve made some new advances and discoveries since you left, Nathaniel,” says Riko, throwing Neil onto the couch. He uses the straps to tie Neil down tighter than necessary, the leather cutting into his skin as he flails, but his wings aren’t moving as he’s telling them to, and the pain is spreading through his other wing and his torso now too, cramp seizing his muscles and distracting Neil: a wet rag is pressed over Neil’s nose and mouth as he gasps for air.

The smell of chloroform hits him too late. Neil passes out.

He tries to cling to consciousness, but the darkness slithers into the periphery of his awareness and has enveloped him before he even realises.

When he wakes, something feels different, strange. Everything hurts, but it's more than that. He squirms, realises that he's not looking at the ceiling, but the floor. He's face down on a bed, strapped to it –that bit's not new – with his face in a hole so he can breathe and see. He tries moving his legs, and his ankles are also strapped to the bed. Also, not new. It's his wings that feel different then. He's grown used to the feel of phantom limbs over the years, the thought of actually moving them a still a strange and uncomfortable feeling he's only managed in the last few months with Andrew's lot.

They're heavier than he remembers. They're not bound to his back, so he stretches them experimentally. He can see the shadow of them creeping across the floor as he spreads them, and they're larger. He can see the edge of a wing as he curves it around the bed, and the moment he does, Neil does one thing – he freaks the fuck out. He thrashes, kicks at his restraints. He flaps his wings – his wings, which are now black and bigger and heavier than before – and pulls as hard as he can.

Leather stretches across his back, cutting into his skin, and Neil has never known his wings to be so strong, so powerful, because as he flaps them, he can feel the bed rock, creak up and off the ground. He keeps thrashing. A wing brushes something, perhaps on a table – Neil can't see it, but he can feel it and he hears it when things go clattering to the ground. He pushes one way with his arms and uses his wings to gain more leverage, and seams in the bed and stitches in his skin tear as he breaks the bonds of the bed.

Neil crashes against the wall, his body suddenly free, and the bed rolls along and crashes into his side. His ankles as still restrained and he reaches up and claws at the buckles until the come undone, and his feet drop to the ground. He uses the wall to pull himself upright, and finally, finally catches sight of himself in the mirror on the other wall.

Enormous black wings fill the room. They nearly brush the walls when he stretches from tip to tip. They are not his wings. Neil knows. He might have physically destroyed his own limbs every month for years on end, but he knows what his wings are meant to look like, meant to feel like. These are fuller, with more layers than he's used to.

Neil only takes his reflection in for a moment before trying to figure more out about his surroundings. some sort of room for patients. He's not sure what kind, but it's sterile in there, with lights on pivots and latex gloves in an unassuming box on the counter. There's a sink in the corner, and an array of small implements – scissors, pliers, that sort of thing. Neil doesn't need to know more. He's about to dash out of the room, try and find an escape, when the door crashes open.

Neil grabs one of the small pairs of scissors, for however much use that will be to him, and brings his fists up immediately. In the doorway is Riko Moriyama, his own black wings filling the doorway as he looms. Behind him is a man in all white, perhaps a doctor or scientist of some sort, but he's no one of note to Neil at the moment. He feels himself hunch his shoulders up ready for a fight.

"Making such a mess," says Riko, his voice snide but level, and Neil snarls at Riko automatically, something inside him registering that Riko was treating him more like an unruly pet, perhaps one that had peed in the pot plant rather than confronted an escaping victim. Neil bends his knees for a second, and flaps his wings. He's not used to the balance, the weight of the air against them yet, but he knows how use wings now and so he flaps and springs forward at Riko, knocking him aside in his attempt to get out into the corridor.

His wings are cramped now, not quite able to stretch out and give him enough velocity, but Neil hasn't got this far by relying on them; he lands jerkily, and takes off at a sprint down the corridor. Behind him, Riko snarls, the sound of feet pounding behind Neil.

This is... not the way out. Neil dashes a look behind him before skidding to a stop. They're still after him, but he feels like he's getting further and further into the laboratory. There were no windows along the corridors, and there are no windows in this room either. It's a laboratory in here. There's an array of machines running dozens of tiny test tubes filled with little samples along one wall, a steady hum that instantly grates on Neil's nerves.

Lab benches run in one unbroken line next to them, covered in ledgers and bits of scrap paper, tablets and a laptop balanced too precariously on one end. The air in here is too still, like someone turned the ventilation off, and there's no one in here even though the machines are on and the notebooks all open, as if people were here just a moment ago. It's like they all vanished, or evacuated because of – oh. Because of danger. Because of him.

Neil nearly laughs at that. He slips the door closed with no sound, and jams a couple of chairs under the doorknob. Birds aren't particularly known for their sense of smell, he doesn't think, so they might not find him right away. He runs a glance across the notes as quickly as he can, to see if there's anything of interest. It's probably futile, scraps of information that require years of study and knowledge and context to understand, but he slips a couple of the slimmer notepads down his shirt anyway. Kevin has years of study and knowledge and context. It might help.

He moves into the next room, which is better than going back the way he came, and startles to a halt again. It's another laboratory in here, but the test tubes are not so small. In fact, the run across the edge of the wall, each one large enough to fit a fully grown human being – with wings. They're not all empty, either. It looks like there are half a dozen with people - specimens - no, definitely people, in, at various stages of development. There's a baby, with tiny wings that barely cover its back to match. There's a child, a teenager, a young adult. They all look eerily similar – as if they're clones.

A shudder runs down Neil's back. There's a myriad of wires, bundled into thick topes with duct tape that come out the back of the tubes and are plugged into the laptops. Neil hesitates – when he’s on the run with the flock, they’re never near too much electricity or signal. Even if he stole a laptop, it would undoubtedly need security clearance, log-ins, wi-fi. As tempting as it is, he leaves it. And them. He leaves them behind. None of them move as he ghosts past them.

There's a sudden loud rattle behind Neil as someone tries the door of the other room, finds it jammed and heaves their weight behind them. The chairs slide away, a roughshod job there by Neil, and Neil swears under his breath, goes for the end of the room where the other door is.

There's a sharp whistle past his ear and Neil doesn't realise until there's an accompanying crack that he'd just been shot at. A thin spray of liquid – it's not water, too viscious to be water - starts spurting out from the tube that was shot.

"You idiot," he hears Riko scream. "Those are the latest experiments! Stop!"

The door at the far end of the corridor is locked. Of course it is. And it opens inward. Neil swears again, punches at the door as hard as he can. Wood gives way under his fist, even as the metal edge of the handle cracks into his knuckles. Thank God, or possibly Kevin, for all the fucking press ups he’s done over the last few months. He does it again; splinters in his fist this time, and now Riko's caught up with him.

Neil grabs the nearest thing he can reach – one of those bundles of wire, heavy when all taped together, and yanks it out from wherever it's connected, heaves it across like a whip as it smashes into glass. Liquid sprays everywhere, as does glass.

Riko screeches like a banshee, and Neil takes the moment to ram his shoulder against the door; it heaves, and the wood gives way, the lock still dangling uselessly in the doorframe. As he pelts down the next corridor, he sees a body slide out of the broken test tube onto the floor. It still doesn't move.

Neil leaves it behind. Them. He leaves them behind.

The next corridor slopes up, a positive sign, he thinks. the next landing has an elevator – one that needs security clearance to use, but it also has a goddamn window. He can see Riko again, drenched, wading up towards him, and Neil tucks his wings against his back and his arms over his face, and hurls himself out of the window.

He hits concrete and rolls. He has no idea where he is, but he stretches his wings, shards of glass falling through his feathers like rivulets of water, and flies like the wind.

He’s just approaching the outer fence when he gets shot.

Neil screams. Pain sears through his arm, no, his wing, no, it’s both, and the air slips out from underneath him; barbed wire rushes up to meet him and Neil kicks at it, tumbling him over the top of the fence, just about.

He lands face-first, his wrists and elbows jarring as he throws them out in front of him. There’s blood down his leg, his clothes shredded on one side from the barbed wire, but he scrabbles to get upright – he can still fly through the pain, he thinks. He’s had worse, he’s sure. He flaps his wings, and they do still work, except now he can hear the sound of shouting, and of dogs barking, and a shot explodes close to his face, too close, and all of his muscles on the right-hand side are screaming in agony.

A shadow swoops out of the sky and snags him around the waist, lifting him up and away; Neil gasps, and thrashes to get free, except – “It’s me.”

Andrew.

Neil sags in relief, letting his wings tuck in close as Andrew loops both arms around his waist. The pain throbs in his arm, his wing, his leg, and wherever else, as Andrew jostles him, zigging and zagging.

There’s more shouting, but it sounds like it’s in the distance now, getting fainter, and fainter, or maybe that’s because Neil is getting fainter and fainter.

 

 

  
  
Neil’s shoulder is on fire when he wakes up. He lurches upright and is startled to see a cluster of faces around him. Everyone’s here, not just Andrew, even if Aaron is sitting off to one side, repacking a bag.

“What happened?”

“You passed out,” says Matt, the corners of his eyes tight with concern. Neil presses his fingers to his temple; that’s thrice he’s been unconscious in a very short space of time, no wonder he feels a bit nauseous. “We distracted the guards, threw them off our scents, and Andrew got you to safety.”

They came to get him. The word is unfamiliar in his throat: “Thanks.”  
“We’re just outside the perimeter. They got the helicopters up before we could get far away enough, so we’re lying low for a second until they’re gone.”

Neil struggles up, and three pairs of hands reach out to help him. He gropes blindly for where it turns, finds a thick bandage around his arm and a wad of dressing and two splints strapped to where it had gone through his wing. He looks at Aaron, who avoids eye contact with him. Huh.

He stretches it out gingerly; he’s pretty sure he’s not going to be able to fly for a few weeks while it heals.

Everything he’d stuffed down his t-shirt is in a messy pile next to him – they’d clearly been going through it as he was unconscious. Now he’s looking around properly, the rest of their stuff looks like it’s been strapped up in a tree. It looks like there’s a lot of it missing; it must have been left behind between the fire and the chase. Neil does spot his dufflebag though.

"Where's Kevin?"

"Keeping the dogs off our backs," says Nicky. "He did some trick with some of our old t-shirts that he's using for bait."

"And you didn't go with him?" That's to Andrew. Andrew's mouth tightens, and Neil makes a note to ask him again when they're not surrounded by everyone else.

"Anyway, you're up and mobile. We need to figure out how we're getting out of here. We're sitting ducks at the moment," says Dan.

Neil shakes his head. "I won't be able to fly."

“What?”

“They did something to my wings—” Everyone turns to look at them, as if noticing that they’re different for the first time. “I can’t move them properly.”

A silence hangs in the air, as everyone suppresses the urge to look at Andrew.

There’s a rustle, and everyone tenses until Kevin appears, looking haggard. There’s a ring of red marks around his neck, like someone managed to their hands around him, but he looks mostly fine otherwise.

"He can't carry me as far as we need to go," says Neil, cutting across all the unsubtle looks and raised eyebrows. "Plus, we need to get back into Evermore."

There’s a rustle, and everyone tenses until Kevin appears, looking haggard. There’s a ring of red marks around his neck, like someone managed to their hands around him, but he looks mostly fine otherwise.

"You just got out of there," protests Nicky. "Literally, we’re barely cleared the grounds. And now you want to go back?"

"Yes," says Neil.

“Back to Evermore?” asks Kevin, catching on at once.

“They won’t be expecting us to go back,” says Neil. “They’ll be gathering up their troops and dogs and helicopters to scour the area and nearby towns. Security will be at a minimum and it’ll be our only shot.”

“Our only shot at what?” asks Aaron. “We’re nowhere near ready to pull off some big espionage plan. We’ve only just started doing some research for it.”

“What were you going to try if I hadn’t already been outside?”

Aaron’s eyes slide sideways to land on Andrew.

“Winging it,” says Andrew.

A nervous giggle breaks through from Nicky, who bites his lip when everyone turns to look at him. “What? That was a joke. Andrew made a pun.”

There’s a slightly stunned look that ripples across the group, and Neil clears his throat to bring the subject back to the present.

“Okay, well, we have to try.” It’s strange hearing himself say these words. For so long, survival was the only path. Mary would smack him stupid if she could see him now; she’d be already dragging him away to the nearest state border.

“With this many of us around, they’ll send out all the security,” predicts Neil. “They must think it’s practically a gift-wrapped present, so many of their escapees in one place, coming to them. So the only people we need to worry about will be some junior security officers, the scientists who don’t work with force, and Riko.”

“Riko’s inside?” Kevin looks over in the direction of Evermore, his face paling.

“I met with him. He’s the one who did this,” says Neil, jabbing at his wings, which are still twitching violently. “He’s not one of us anymore, he’s definitely part of Evermore.”

“So what’s the plan?” asks Alison impatiently. “Go in there and burn everything? How’s that any different from what they did to us?”

“We’ve got to free everyone first,” protests Dan. “The other subjects, and Neil mentioned – the pregnant women too.”

“Leverage,” says Andrew suddenly. “We get leverage.”

 

 

 

It’s not that difficult to get inside. All the measures are to stop people from leaving, after all. They walk straight in through the visitor centre attached to the maternity wing.

The receptionist gasps, and reaches for the phone – Renee casually reaches out with a pocketknife, and slices through the wires.

“Don’t,” she advises the woman. Renee looks at the name plate. “We don’t want to hurt you, Kate. Please push your chair back against the wall.”

Kate rolls her chair backwards and Renee watches her as Andrew moves around to use her computer, sends off some emails they hope will change everything. As soon as he’s done, he hits send, and deletes it out of the sent inbox.

He nods at Renee, and she reaches out to grab Kate’s security pass, ignoring her flinch. “We’ll be needing this.”

As they walk past, Kate presses the panic button but, as Kevin had predicted, a grate only slams down over the front door. They use her pass, and move through into the back.

From there, they split up, half of them with Kevin and half with Neil, as the two people who have been here before. Andrew, to Kevin’s surprise, goes with Neil.

Neil and Andrew are the two that everyone here knows about – Neil was captured, and they would have seen Andrew just outside the perimeter. That means that they’re the diversion group: they can afford to be seen.

Retracing his steps from barely an hour ago, Neil ignores the pounding headache and the churning in his stomach: it can’t be good for him to be unconscious so frequently so quickly, but one of the pros of the genetic mutation is accelerated healing. Surely, he can only start to feel better; even the pain in his wing has dulled to a throbbing ache, although he doesn’t know if that’s just because compared to shearing them off completely, this is nothing.

In return, Andrew, Renee and Matt don’t mention the way that his wings are still spasming, or that he has to stop every few hundred yards to catch his breath.

“They’re changing,” says Matt.

“What?” Neil’s focussed on trying to remember the way back.

“Your wings. They’re kind of losing the black.”

Neil tries to stretch one out. He’s right. They’re streaked with black, like it’s fading out, and now Matt’s mentioned it, they do look slightly smaller now. Neil’s hopes rise despite himself – perhaps whatever Riko did wasn’t permanent.

“He didn’t get a chance to finish whatever he wanted to do before I fought my way out.”

“Good for you,” says Matt and Neil finds himself smiling hesitantly back at him. He’s only been with them for a few months, but they’d folded him into the flock almost instantly. He still can’t quite comprehend the idea that they all flew here to find him.

  
“Come on,” says Renee gently. “We’re running out of time.”

They burst into the labs, and cause fucking chaos.

There are people in there, trying to clean up the mess Neil already made, but Neil’s right – it’s just scientists trying to preserve their work, mopping up and tidying. There’s a body on a trolley, covered with a sheet, and Neil refuses to feel guilty about someone that was never alive in the first place.

They grab chairs and wield them like weapons. They grab laptops like they’re planning on running with them, and smash the lightbulbs, plunging the underground labs into darkness, and race down corridors, leaving destruction in their wake. Kate’s pass doesn’t have access to a lot of areas, but Andrew steals another one off a lab worker by raising a gun to them. There aren’t any bullets in it, Neil is pretty sure, but it works.

They get into the guard security office, currently manned by a single person, and Matt wrestles him to the ground, grabbing his handcuffs and cuffing him to the radiator across the room.

“Red alert! Intruders in the lower floor labs! All security personnel to the lower floor labs!” shouts Neil into the loudspeaker system. “All other staff members, please evacuate to your nearest safety point. I repeat, please evacuate. We have armed intruders in the building.”

They turn off all the security cameras, smashing and slashing at bits of machinery if they can’t work out how it works quickly enough. Renee grabs every single scrap of portable storage she can see, from USB sticks to portable hard drives to tapes that they have no idea how to play.

And then they leave.

There’s a helicopter overhead as they drive out the staff exit with a filched transport van and Neil peers up at it. It’s not the same as the ones that were pursuing them earlier – this one is a slim private affair, descending slowly onto the helipad.

“He’s here,” says Neil. “Let’s hope the others got out.”

“Who’s that?” asks Matt. There’s a figure suddenly darting out one of the windows, wings spreading, and Neil cranes to see who it is. This isn’t part of the plan.

The wings are black; it’s not one of them. And then they turn, and Neil inhales sharply. “It’s Riko. He must be coming after us.”

“Pull away from the window,” says Andrew as Riko spirals down, carried by the warm air emanating from the building, and spots them.

Neil desperately wants to keep an eye on him, but does as Andrew says. It’ll be harder for Riko if he has to get up close to see them. But then there’s a _crack_ of a gunshot.

“Duck!” Renee yells, and they all do – but the shot didn’t go anywhere near them. It sounds like it came from far away, but it’s still loud enough to make Neil jump in his seat, and he throws caution to the wind and leans back to the window.

“I can’t see Riko,” he says, scanning the sky frantically.

“There,” says Matt, pointing behind them. Neil twists so he can just about see him in the side mirror. Riko’s flying funny, lurching to one side.

Renee says from the other side, “I see the gun. In the helicopter.”

Neil squints to look at the helicopter. Now she’s mentioned it, he can see the gleam of a gun. Maybe. “You think they shot Riko?”

There’s another _crack_ , this one closer, and Riko drops out of the sky. Neil flinches.

“I guess so,” says Matt finally. “What do we do?”

“Nothing,” says Andrew. He puts his foot down on the gas. “We carry on.”

They stop briefly to grab their stuff, and then split up. Andrew and Neil keep the van and head east; Renee and Matt head south. There won’t be any contact from any of the others for days, if this works.

They drive until Neil finally notices that Andrew’s eyes are bloodshot and he’s breathing shallowly, and Neil should have seen that he hit exhaustion point.

They could drive through the night, but neither of them are used to driving. Neil points at the first motel with flickering, cheap neon lights that he sees. “Pull over.”

Andrew clearly thinks he’s being stupid, but he still does it. Neil rummages in his duffle. The largest thing is a hoodie from before, when he didn’t need to rip the back out to accommodate his wings. It definitely won’t hide them completely, but he drags it on anyway, and tucks them in as best as he can.

Neil checks himself as best as he can in the rearview mirror, but it looks reasonably like he might be wearing a really big hoodie with a thick hood. It’s night, and he hopes that no one’s going to check too closely.

He grabs a few notes out of his duffelbag, and a few minutes later, he’s got a key out of an apathetic staff member.

The room is utilitarian, a box of scuffed carpet with dubious-looking stains on it. It’s obviously for a certain clientele, because everything is a faded shade of sickly pink.

Still, it’s a welcome relief. Neil parks the van in the space right outside the room so that Andrew can head into the room without anyone seeing him. He grabs some semblance of food out of the vending machine outside and pulls the flimsy curtains that smell of cigarette smoke across.

Neil peels off his disguise as soon as he can. The muscles in his wings have calmed down considerably over the last few hours. He stretches them in relief, and Andrew does the same. They had tried to be as inconspicuous as possible whilst on the road. Neil examines his wings. It looks like he can move them properly now, at least, but they’re still stained with black in patches, and they’re fuller than he remembers.

They eat their way through shitty junk food – though Andrew seems to actually quite like the pot noodles – and take a moment to just breathe.

There’s only one bed: motels of this kind pretty much always do, Neil has discovered, though when he had shared them with Mary as a child, he hadn’t yet understood why.

“You take it,” says Neil. “I’ll take the couch.”

The couch looks like a sagging set of cushions that once had aspirations to be a couch. Andrew puts one hand in the middle and leans his weight on it.

“I think my hand just hit the floor,” he says. “We can share the bed.”

  
Neil nods. “I’m going to try the shower.”

He misses the convenience of showers, even the crappy motel one that dribbles and leaks. He feels a lot better after he’s scrubbed himself from head to toe. He doesn’t trust the towel to be actually clean so he just air dries himself in the small bathroom, waving his arms every so often and examining his reflection in the mirror as the steam dissipates.

He’s lean – a lot of exercise and a clean diet will do that for him – but all of his scars have faded to pink by now. He pulls on a ratty pair of sweatpants, and doesn’t bother with a t-shirt. It’ll just hang off him where he’s ripped half the back out anyway.

“I left you some hot water,” he says, shaking the last few droplets out of his hair. Andrew eyes his bare chest for a moment, and bites his lip as if stopping himself from saying anything. Neil blinks, and the moment is over as Andrew pushes away and heads past him into the bathroom.

Andrew’s clearly put himself on the side of the bed that faces the door. Good idea. Neil settles himself into the other. He would prefer having his back to a wall, but there’s something comforting about being in the bed with someone he can trust to watch his back. This is why he sought out the others in the first place; watching his own back is exhausting.

He’s dozing off when there’s the soft click of a door. Neil sits upright immediately, his reflexes honed, but it’s just Andrew coming out of the shower. Like Neil, he’s decided not to wear a t-shirt, and Neil stares. He can’t help himself.

Neil’s never seen Andrew with his shirt before, which is unusual of itself. They all lived pretty much on top of each other. There wasn’t a lot of modesty afforded in tents and washing in rivers. Neil had figured after Andrew told him about how he got his wings that he didn’t like people being able to see his scars.

Andrew’s arms are thick, and his chest and back muscles are defined. No wonder Andrew is strong enough to carry Neil on top of his own mass. His wings are well-groomed and full in feathers. They look sleek and well taken care of, not the rumpled mess that Neil’s are.

A muscle in Andrew’s jaw twitches, and Neil drags his eyes away. He feels like he should apologise, but he doesn’t get the chance because Andrew just sits down next to Neil, like he used to when he used to trap Neil in a tree. His eyes are that same intensity and Neil finds himself falling into them.

“Looked your fill?” asks Andrew, and his voice is so even that Neil can’t tell what he’s trying to imply.

“I could look some more.”

Andrew exhales, a slightly snort. Amusement, Neil deduces. Raising his hand, he adds, “Can I touch your wings?”

Andrew shrugs a shoulder, but Neil waits him out. His voice is not as casual as his words. “Go ahead.”

Neil reaches out and strokes one finger down the outermost layer of feathers and Andrew watches him. Neil feels the way his wings tremble, as if they want to pull away, unused to contact, but Andrew's gaze on his face is steady. He thinks that Andrew wouldn't much like it if he pointed out the weakness his body is betrayed, so instead he feels stroking down the wing instead, inching inward with each stroke, and still Andrew says nothing. It's not until Neil reaches the base of his wing, where it joins into back muscle, that Andrew says, "No."

And Neil stills.

Andrew turns to face him and looks at him with his hand outstretched his, and leans forward until his breath ghosts over Neil's hand. "Yes or no?" he asks, his tongue wetting his lower lip.

Oh. Neil swallows. "Yes."

Andrew slides Neil's finger into his mouth, the tip of his tongue tickling along the sensitive pad of Neil's finger, and he shudders. He's never thought that his fingers were sensitive before.

"Unfair," says Neil, though the word sticks in his throat. "I thought we were talking about our wings only."

Andrew draws back, popping his lips at Neil. "Life’s unfair. What’re you going to do about it?"

True. Point taken, and conceded. Neil wipes his hand down his jeans nervously - not because it felt bad, but because it felt good and now he feels slightly awkward for sitting here with his hand in the air, one finger outstretched.

  
The warmth of Andrew’s breath heats the air between them, he’s that close. Neil doesn’t ask: he answers. “Yes.”

Andrew’s lips are soft, and he tastes of toothpaste, and Neil doesn’t really care. He follows him forward close and Andrew doesn’t yield, strong as Neil leans in.

Neil hasn’t done this in a long time, and it hadn’t felt anything like this. Neil tucks his hands in his lap until Andrew reaches blindly for them, the rough skin of his palms scraping over Neil’s, grabbing them and draping them around his shoulders. Neil keeps them where they’ve been put; his fingers just tickling the hair at the back of Andrew’s hair. He’ll take anything he’s given.

“Thank you,” murmurs Neil when they pull apart. It takes a couple of blinks for his eyes to focus, and when he manages it, Andrew is looking at him from too close. He hadn’t pulled apart at all.

“For – everything,” clarifies Neil, badly. “For coming.”

Andrew’s eyes narrow. “Everyone came.”

“You did it,” says Neil. He’s been thinking about it in the car; he’s had enough time. Everyone came for him, he knows, but they wouldn’t have done it without Andrew. An Andrew who actually wants something is a force to be reckoned with.

Andrew doesn’t deny it.

 

 

 

They head to Baltimore, Neil driving this time. It’s where Neil’s father is, but it’s the nearest big city. Besides, it’s not like Neil has ever actually met his father, just the people he’d sent after them. Mary said, constantly, that Neil looked like the spitting image of his father when he was younger.

They stop off to buy some oversized clothes and sunglasses, and wrestle them on. They ditch the van in a shitty part of town, and carjack a slightly older car. Andrew raises his eyebrows as Neil hotwires it.

“My mother taught me,” he says. “We only did it once, just before she died.”

Andrew doesn’t say anything, just pushes the passenger seat as far back as it will go so that they can fit their bags in the front with them. 

They find another hotel, a slightly more upscale one this time that looks askew at them until Neil pulls out one of his credit cards. He orders a laptop online, to be sent to the hotel and shells out for next day delivery.

An email is waiting for him by the time he gets set up to the internet.

“We’re in business,” he informs Andrew.

They settle in to wait. This hotel room also only has one room.

 

 

 

“How does it feel to be poor?” asks Nicky. “I still can’t believe you had that much money just floating around.”

It still doesn’t quite feel real to Neil. Coming back to Evermore again was Kevin’s idea, but it had been Kevin’s home for a lot longer than Neil’s. They’re standing on the second floor, watching delivery trucks arrive. Everything’s being unloaded at the door – they’ll go down once the trucks have all left, and sort it out in their own time.

In the meantime, Neil’s got paperwork coming out of his ears. The main contract, the one stating sale of the Evermore Research Institute to one Nathaniel Hatford, has been finalised, signed and countersigned, and a copy of it is in the desk that is newly his.

“It was never my money,” says Neil abstractly. The others, Andrew excepted, had all been stunned to find out that not only did Neil have almost half a million dollars at his fingertips, but that he had given most of that up to buy Evermore from Ichirou Moriyama, with the stipulation that no one was killed. He’d shown Ichirou a portion of the evidence they had gathered from Evermore – a bluff, because Neil hadn’t known what information they would manage to gather when they stormed Evermore, but Kevin’s team had pulled through.

While Neil had pulled all the guards to deal with their destruction in the lower labs, they had moved through into the offices, stealing all the information they could get their hands on. It might be a small part of the Moriyama business empire, but there had to be something linking the Moriyamas to Evermore directly.

With that, Neil struck his deal with Ichirou. Neil gets Evermore, and its inhabitants, unharmed. Ichirou gets his money back, the money that Mary stole from them in the first place to finance her getaway with her son, and they don’t spread the word of the human experiments, the atrocities, that have been happening in Evermore.

Ichirou had agreed with a grace that Neil hadn’t expected. The initial contact had been over email, but then Ichirou had flown in to meet with Neil. He hadn’t batted an eyelash at the wings on Neil’s or Andrew’s backs, though a couple of his men had stared a bit.

“You have me over a barrel,” Ichirou had said smoothly. “And it is a position I do not relish being in.”

Neil had got the sense that if he thought he could solve the problem by killing them all, he would have. But Neil had said that all of the information was set to be sent out to top journalists all over the world even if he was killed, and that had probably been the thing that had saved him. That, and Ichirou seemed almost impressed by his attitude.

“This investment was of my father’s,” Ichirou continued, “done out of indulgence and love to his brother. I harbour no attachment to it. You will ensure that our paths do not cross again, Nathaniel.”

And he had left, wiping his hands of the whole damn thing. Neil is still shocked it was so easy, in the end.

There’s a lot of work to be done. For one, the piles of furniture and paint and other DIY shit piled up against the door. He had given the current residents a deal. They could stay at Evermore, now a home rather than a prison, or they could leave but never return. He didn’t want to risk too much travel of winged people in and out of Evermore; sooner or later, someone would see them.

All the scientists have been shipped off to Ichirou’s other businesses; there’s a team of subjects with an affinity for science now trying to wade through years of experimentation documentation to make sense of it so that they can learn more about themselves.

They walk downstairs to help. Dan and Matt have laid claim on Tetsuji’s old en-suite residence penthouse, and are lugging some blue paint up to redecorate. The others have claimed various areas they want to use as theirs.

“I want to show you something,” says Neil quietly to Andrew. Andrew raises an eyebrow, but follows Neil as Neil spreads his wings. They’re still blotched with bits of black here and there, but Neil doesn’t mind. They’re his now.

They soar upwards, over the recreation grounds – Nicky was making plans to convert it into a basketball court last Neil heard – and towards the lake. This is the reason that Evermore was built here; it’s a natural source of water that they could build a small dam on and take advantage of.

The first thing that Neil had done once he owned Evermore was to take a proper tour around the lands, and figure out what it was he had just bought himself. It had to be more than classrooms and guard barracks. And that was when he had discovered the little cabin on the lake.

It was likely overlooked; Neil couldn’t imagine that Kengo particularly cared about demolishing an abandoned cabin on the furthest edge of his property. It looks like an old lodge for keen fishers, with a stack of rods in the corner.

It’s dusty, and Neil had broken the lock on the door when he’d come here a few days ago, but it’s obviously well-built; there’s no damp or leaks evident from the last winter. It was originally a small, one-room affair, but he can see where it was extended backwards, so that it now wraps around an old tree, and another storey added with the staircase wrapping around the tree trunk in a spiral upwards.

Neil steps out, and there’s both a balcony and a tree branch thick enough to stand on twisting out. Neil steps onto the branch and plops himself down. Andrew looks at him for a moment before joining him, the length of their legs just brushing, their wings pressed flush.

The view overlooks the lake. From this angle, Evermore is hidden by the cabin, and ahead of them is just water and trees.

“It could do with a bit of work,” says Neil. He puts his hand on his leg, hand facing up. “You want to help?”

Andrew looks away from the lake to look at Neil, and Neil knows that he was never really looking at the lake at all. He slots his fingers in between Neil’s. “Yes.”

 

[ ](http://still-waiting-for-godot.tumblr.com/post/163720213344/art-for-the-lovely-wing-fic-by-defractum-for)

Art by [still-waiting-for-godot](http://still-waiting-for-godot.tumblr.com/post/163720213344/art-for-the-lovely-wing-fic-by-defractum-for)

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks so much for reading! Please do leave a comment, or come talk to me on [tumblr](http://defractum.tumblr.com).


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